For all intents and purposes, this site is moderated by children. Which to me is a problem.

It's always nice to ask for input from the community but to run a business (which essentially is what this is) you need the people above to make decisions and come up with ideas. Seems a bit redundant to ask the people who are already here what would make new people flock to the site. The answer is probably a lot broader than anyone here is capable of assessing.

I wish you the best of luck, though. Years ago I used to LOVE coming onto GTF. It would be nice to capture some of that back and instill it in new members.

ad-hominem wrote:For all intents and purposes, this site is moderated by children. Which to me is a problem.

It's always nice to ask for input from the community but to run a business (which essentially is what this is) you need the people above to make decisions and come up with ideas. Seems a bit redundant to ask the people who are already here what would make new people flock to the site. The answer is probably a lot broader than anyone here is capable of assessing.

I wish you the best of luck, though. Years ago I used to LOVE coming onto GTF. It would be nice to capture some of that back and instill it in new members.

Odd observation considering the majority of the mod team are adults and the ones that aren't are extremely mature and intelligent.

ad-hominem wrote:For all intents and purposes, this site is moderated by children. Which to me is a problem.

It's always nice to ask for input from the community but to run a business (which essentially is what this is) you need the people above to make decisions and come up with ideas. Seems a bit redundant to ask the people who are already here what would make new people flock to the site. The answer is probably a lot broader than anyone here is capable of assessing.

I wish you the best of luck, though. Years ago I used to LOVE coming onto GTF. It would be nice to capture some of that back and instill it in new members.

Odd observation considering the majority of the mod team are adults and the ones that aren't are extremely mature and intelligent.

More than happy to retract that, I don't know who is moderating the site lately. But when I see them they're usually young.

ad-hominem wrote:For all intents and purposes, this site is moderated by children. Which to me is a problem.

It's always nice to ask for input from the community but to run a business (which essentially is what this is) you need the people above to make decisions and come up with ideas. Seems a bit redundant to ask the people who are already here what would make new people flock to the site. The answer is probably a lot broader than anyone here is capable of assessing.

I wish you the best of luck, though. Years ago I used to LOVE coming onto GTF. It would be nice to capture some of that back and instill it in new members.

Odd observation considering the majority of the mod team are adults and the ones that aren't are extremely mature and intelligent.

More than happy to retract that, I don't know who is moderating the site lately. But when I see them they're usually young.

Jack, Des, JT and Joe are adults, and Jon is a highly mature teenager.

A) Meta Description: Basically, a relevant summary of a page.B) Headings: Tags that tell what that page is.C) Sitemap: This tells search engines where all your pages are.D) SSL: This secures user information being sent to the website. It's not needed, but Google is now docking SEO for not having one.

These can all be fixed with a few lines of HTML or a few clicks. You can easily get an SSL with your host or CloudFlare (free), which I personally use.

The lack of mobile compatabilty is hurting too, but I suppose that should be fixed with the new theme.

Thanks, I do know what SEO and SSL are

Meta description and keywords have been present for 9+ years. You were understandably confused by the Website Grader thingy's way of presenting things, but if you look closely, what it actually says is that the description is there but it reckons the current one is 16 characters too long, so that's obviously something we'll have to take into account as we recast it.

We actually do have headings, just not every single one WG likes to see. I'll see about adding more and cleaning them up in case it makes a difference!

I'll be sure to check out phpBB extensions to provide a sitemap as well

That's an interesting phrasing! "Docking our search-engine optimization" doesn't sound like something Google has the ability to do

But! As it happens, I recently set up HTTPS support. I wasn't going to mention it or default everyone to it until I was sure everything worked correctly and it wouldn't hurt our rankings, which is something that can happen, but if you'd checked the WG report in the last 4 days or soanytime this month, you would have seen that it actually gives us a score of 10 out of 10 for security, saying "Safe and secure. Nice job."

Jacketh wrote:Perhaps we can spice our current chat up a little... Rene, do you know if there any way we can add additional smileys? The basic-ass smileys have always bugged me I've seen other chats using 123Flashchat have their own additional smileys, I'm just not sure how they're doing it.

I'm not sure either! I know how to add "Flash emotions" (but not why anyone would want to do such a thing).

I now know why I haven't been able to figure out how to add our own smileys: the greedy bastards who created 123FlashChat apparently wanted to be paid $100 for every dozen custom smileys added. They don't seem to exist anymore, but I've just discovered this on a mirror of the missing 123flashchat.com website:

Jacketh wrote:Would you suggest this in addition or as a replacement for the chatroom?

My worry if it is an addition would be it is neglected as everyone heads to the chatroom, therefore made to look empty and that suggests we're not active

Then if we replace chat with a shoutbox, everyone who uses the site purely for more personal interaction on chat (which, with the addition of smileys and the webcam, it is more personal that a shoutbox), would suddenly turn away?

How do you mean it is neglected and therefore made to look empty? I wasn't really think of it as a shoutbox which you can also send messages in, but more like a quick way of seeing what's going on in the chatroom.

Very possible. It already keeps a record of public messages, so it could be as simple as writing a little script to show just the last few messages, putting that in an iframe and having it reload every few seconds.

That would be a bit messy, though. An AJAX implementation would be a lot smoother and would mean it wouldn't have to reload the whole iframe all the time just to check for new messages (in the same way threads don't need to reload when you press the like button).

Pity wrote:Idk. Something kind of irks me about knowing random users are watching my personal conversations, even if it is public chat.

Same here.

Considering that we now let in guest users I'm not sure how worthwhile this will be. I'd rather have people be made to go into the chat instead of just sat there watching what's going on. We were discussing paedophillia yesterday as well, and for that to show up on the front page might be... less good - especially as someone can't be quickly brought up to date on what on earth is going on in chat if they're just lurking on the front page watching it.

- We will have a poll very shortly for what colour the new theme should be. We cannot agree on what shade of blue should be our default, so this will be decided in a poll to members. This should happen in the next couple of days.

- Quarto will become the default theme once we figure the above out.

- The Community Ambassadors will then be expected to perform more duties in regards to social media and site activity.

- The Community Ambassadors activity will be assessed and necessary changes made shortly.